Adobe hopes to attract more developers to their Flex platform by releasing its SDK under terms of the Mozilla Public License.

Adobe Flex Enters Open Source

Through their shift of the Flex SDK to an open source model, Adobe has presented a compelling challenge to developers who may have considered trying Microsoft’s Silverlight platform.

Microsoft’s entry into cross-browser, rich Internet application creation just hit a big speed bump. Open source developers who inherently mistrust Microsoft on some level are likely to check out Adobe Flex for their cross-browser app construction needs.

This news also helps boost support for Adobe’s Apollo product. Apollo allows developers to take an application created for online use, and repurpose it as a desktop application running on top of the Apollo framework.

Adobe announced the release schedule for open sourcing Flex on their wiki:

The source code for the Flex framework is already available within the free distribution of the current Flex 2 SDK. By this summer, Adobe plans to put in place most of the infrastructure (public bug database and public daily builds) required to run the Flex SDK as an open source project. We expect to complete the transition to a fully open source project (source code for the compiler, infrastructure for community contributions, etc.) by the end of 2007.

Companies that wish to obtain commercial licenses for the Flex SDK will be able to do so. That applies to other Adobe products that use the Flex SDK, like Flash Player and ColdFusion.

Robert Scoble has a couple of videos taken with the Adobe Flex team. They discuss the news about open sourcing Flex, and review Flex’s architecture and components as related to the announcement.